"Death by Lethal Injunction: National Emergency Strikes Under the
Taft-Hartley Act"
BY: MICHAEL H. LEROY
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Economics/Labor and Industrial Relations
JOHN H. JOHNSON
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Economics/Labor and Industrial Relations
Paper ID: Bureau of Econ. & Bus. Research Working Paper No.
00-0116
Date: July 25, 2000
Contact: MICHAEL H. LEROY
Email: Mailto:m-leroy at staff.uiuc.edu
Postal: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Economics/Labor and Industrial Relations
504 East Armory Avenue
Champaign, IL 61820-6297 USA
Phone: 217-244-4092
Co-Auth: JOHN H. JOHNSON
Email: Mailto:jhjohnsn at uiuc.edu
Postal: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Economics/Labor and Industrial Relations
Room 213
504 East Armory Avenue
Champaign, IL 61820-6297 USA
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ABSTRACT:
The Taft-Hartley Act gives the President and federal courts
extraordinary power to enjoin lawful strikes that pose a threat
to national health or safety. Although rarely used, this power
has great impact. We show that Taft-Hartley injunctions lowered
public support for unions by portraying them as selfish economic
actors who were harmful to the nation, and altered the balance
of bargaining power in critical strikes, usually to the
detriment of unions.
We trace these injunctions to their common law antecedents
from the 1820s. We show that courts routinely abused their
equitable powers in labor disputes. Our research shows that
Taft-Hartley courts have failed to avoid this pitfall. They (1)
failed to exercise judicial powers, (2) relied on distorted
assumptions to support injunctions, (3) interpreted national
health to mean national inconvenience, (4) favored the
government - and by extension, powerful employers - by granting
eighty percent of the petitions for injunctions, and (5) issued
impractical orders.
Although the last Taft-Hartley injunction was issued in the
1970s, this public policy remains relevant in two respects. When
major strikes affect the nation - most recently, the 1997
Teamsters strike at UPS - presidents respond to growing public
pressure by threatening to invoke this power. Although
politically expedient, this power undermines a main tenet of the
National Labor Relations Act that permits unions to strike in
support of their bargaining proposals. In addition, our research
questions a current theory explaining that the sharp decline in
strikes resulted from President Reagan's use of the striker
replacement doctrine in the PATCO strike. By showing that
President Carter's use of Taft-Hartley in the 1977-1978 national
coal strike caused the first sharp drop in strikes, and by
demonstrating that this law was intended to impair this right,
we show that the presidency plays a more complex role in the
dying right to strike.